This invention relates to household refrigerators and, in particular, to refrigerators which incorporate a hot liquid, anti-sweat loop.
Many current refrigerators include a freezer compartment with a door that opens to the room separate from the door for the fresh food compartment. It is normal for such freezer compartments to have a small amount of cold air leakage and/or conduction through the freezer door sealing gasket. As a result, the front face of the refrigerator housing or casing around the freezer access opening is cold. When warm, humid household air contacts this cold area moisture condenses on the front of the housing.
"Anti-sweat" heaters are installed next to the inside of the casing in these areas to prevent such condensation. A well-known manner of providing such heat is to use a hot liquid loop in a manner described hereafter. The refrigeration system includes a compressor, condenser and evaporator. The compressor compresses gaseous refrigerant and passes it to the condenser where it condenses into a liquid. The liquid subsequently passes through a capillary tube to the evaporator where heat from inside the refrigerator is used to boil the refrigerant from a liquid to a gas. The gaseous refrigerant then returns to the compressor. The condenser is an elongated tube that is formed in a serpentine and contains hot refrigerant. A portion of this tube can be used to perform the anti-sweat function. U.S. Pat. No. 4,735,062 Woolley et al, issued on Apr. 5, 1988, and assigned to General Electric Company, illustrates and describes various aspects of a refrigerator with such an anti-sweat hot liquid loop. U.S. Pat. No. 4,735,062 is incorporated herein by reference.
The compressor normally is positioned in a machinery compartment below the refrigerated spaces of the refrigerator and the condenser is normally mounted to the outside rear wall of the refrigerator cabinet or housing. Thus, it is common for the hot loop conduit to be introduced through the bottom wall or the lower portion of the rear wall of the housing. Since the freezer access opening is at the upper front portion of the cabinet, the hot liquid loop conduit is relatively long and includes a number of bends. In prior art machines the hot liquid conduit loop merely passed through an opening in the housing back wall or bottom wall. Once the conduit was properly positioned adjacent the front of the housing, the opening was closed with a putty-like material and the foam insulation was formed. Such an assembly involves several potential problems. For example, as the loop is moved about within the housing to seat it in the proper orientation it rubbed against the raw edge of the housing wall and, at least on occasions, was bent against the wall. This scored and created stress risers in the tubing that often led to subsequent failure. Also the putty-like material often was not adequate to prevent leaks of the foam insulation material. To overcome this difficulty, tape would be manually added over the outside of the putty. Such prior art systems required great care and significant manual effort and were not universally successful.